EVENTS:
- 1818 – Illinois becomes the 21st U.S. state.
- 1971 – Indo-Pakistani War of 1971: Pakistan launches a pre-emptive strike against India and a full-scale war begins claiming hundreds of lives.
- 1973 – Pioneer program: Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
- 1976 – An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley. He is shot twice, and plays a concert two days later.
- 1984 – Bhopal disaster: A methyl isocyanate leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, kills more than 3,800 people outright and injures 150,000–600,000 others (some 6,000 of whom would later die from their injuries) in one of the worst industrial disasters in history.
- 1992 – A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world’s first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.
- 2012 – At least 475 people are killed after Typhoon Bopha makes landfall in the Philippines.
- 2014 – The Japanese space agency, JAXA, launches the space explorer Hayabusa 2 from the Tanegashima Space Center on a six-year round trip mission to a asteroid to collect rock samples.
BIRTHS:
- 1884 – Rajendra Prasad, Indian lawyer and politician, 1st President of India (d. 1963)
- 1886 – Manne Siegbahn, Swedish physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1978)
- 1889 – Khudiram Bose, Indian activist (d. 1908)
- 1894 – Deiva Zivarattinam, Indian lawyer and politician (d. 1975)
- 1900 – Richard Kuhn, Austrian-German biochemist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1967)
- 1923 – Trevor Bailey, English cricketer (d. 2011)
- 1933 – Paul J. Crutzen, Dutch chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate
- 1937 – Binod Bihari Verma, Indian physician and author (d. 2003)
- 1976 – Mark Boucher, South African cricketer
- 1977 – Troy Evans, American football player
- 1981 – Tyjuan Hagler, American football player
- 1985 – Mohit Sehgal, Indian actor
- 1986 – Josh Vaughan, American football player
- 1987 – Brian Robiskie, American football player
